


Midsummers Dream

by muaaimoi



Category: Midsommar (2019)
Genre: F/M, Sociopathic Behavior, ritual suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28410315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muaaimoi/pseuds/muaaimoi
Summary: For Dani the Horga are both the beginning and the end. She tries not to think about before.
Relationships: Dani Ardor/Pelle (Midsommar)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 36





	Midsummers Dream

On the day of her Attestupa, it occurs to Dani that she had been waiting forty-six years to die. Forty-six years with the Horga, Horga herself since the day she won her throne as May Queen and gave the order to burn her then-boyfriend to death.

She hadn't been thinking then. Ordering Christians death, realizing that all the other outsiders, all the other non-Horga, were dead hadn't hit her consciously. She could blame the drugs she was on at the time, but Dani knew better then, and she did even more so in her last moments. 

She hadn't been thinking, she had been too busy feeling. Raw in her pain, so certain she'd lost everything. She hadn't considered herself Horga at the time. Dani had not understood the ways the cult had been eager to embrace her, how suitable she was to be assimilated. She simply thought that if she was to lose Christian regardless, it might as well be by her own choice. 

After, watching the ritual temple burning felt surreal, like some misremembered nightmare where she couldn't figure out if she was a victim or one of the monsters herself.

She’d expected her own death in the following days. Participating in the rest of the festival as instructed. Drinking down the laced concoctions the Horga happily plied her with and partying with the frank abandon of what she believed to be her last days. 

Dani had embraced the concept of going out with a bang. Quite literally fucking Pelle stupid on the ninth day with an animal favor that had left her feeling more and less than human. She had been at peace with the thought. She didn't mind dying among the Horga, for them, as they'd surely claim, but Dani had not cared about the particulars at the time, sure that the end was nigh.

It wasn't until she was getting on a plane to the United States with Pelle at her side that it began to occur to her that maybe it wasn't. 

She lied to the Swedish police about her boyfriend and his friends getting into a car with some backpackers after they had a fight. About how Pelle had been kind and gave her the address to his village, to stay in and ride out the fight. The Horga reported that the Americans were supposed to spend some time with them for midsommar but claimed the celebration happened a few weeks later in July. That they simply never turned up, not unusual for a group of college-aged men on a trip sightseeing in another country. 

But that was months after. When Christians's mother started calling her, and never really stopped even after Dani told her they broke up. Christians's mom had never liked her, and Dani found herself darkly amused to find she'd become the woman's last lifeline to her son. The woman was convinced Dani would hear from him before she did.

If only she knew. 

It was monstrous to think so. Monstrous to string the woman along with assurances that she would pick up the phone and inform her in a heartbeat if she ever heard from her son. 

But Dani had burnt her humanity on an altar of a yellow temple and darker things had moved in. Dark things that the Horga nurtured sweetly. With Pelle always in her ear with compliments and suggestions. Always ready to distract her when useless things like doubt or guilt tried to find their way back inside her.

He was the one that first told her she was part of the Horga and made her believe it. Especially once he married her. Eighty bucks and a trip to the courthouse to qualify for his green card. Of course, it could have also simply been a backup plan should she rediscover her humanity and report the cult.

The Horga were clearly practiced at such things.

They even reported Ignemar missing. 

Claiming he was supposed to have come with guests from London two weeks after they burned in the fire. There had been witnesses who had seen them arrive at the airport and some sweet soul had indicated that all of their gear seemed to be made for camping.

She didn't know if the tip someone gave the police about seeing them hiking in the woods was real, or simply part of the Horga preparation. The police raided the woods searching for them. Naturally, there were no bodies to be found. More missing people. But tourists were tourists and tourists got lost all the time abroad. Some simply never made it home. 

Pelle read her the family's report with a cunning smirk and laughing eyes. Dani, always happy to distract herself with her attraction to him, rode him until they broke Josh's favorite chair. Then they laughed because it wasn't like he was around to yell at them about it. Mostly she tried learning swedish with Pelle in between her classes. All the Horga were expected to speak several languages.

Dani had also helped Pelle rifle through the three sacrifice’s things. The truly valuable things like wallets, laptops, and phones had of course been torched in Sweden. 

But Mark had an extensive video game collection she'd sold for petty cash and Christian had a really ugly pure silver statue he’d brought on a trip to Taiwan that was his most prized possession his parents couldn't know about, because he'd spent two thousand dollars on it, that Dani was also happy to trade for money. Her parent's insurance had barely covered their and Terri's funeral, and like many college students, Dani was strapped for cash. 

Ironically the trip to Sweden had put her especially deep into credit card debt and she'd only paid for the round trip flight. So they sold things they thought the recently deceased's family wouldn't miss, and moved into Danis apartment because it was cheaper.

Things were still easy after that. 

The few friends that hadn't completely flown the coop in the face of Dani's bizarre horrible tragedy of a life made some noises about how much better a boyfriend Pelle was than her ex. She finished her master's in time with Pelle and in the face of having literally no one else to turn to, followed him home like a duckling imprinted on its mother. 

They only went back to the Horga for holidays. 

Dani received an education on their rituals and the meaning behind them as she went year by year. She wasn’t expected to get everything right right away but she was expected to continue the practice of bringing back new bloods.

Then Dani got pregnant. She kept waiting for that to feel complicated. 

It didn't. 

She had four kids with Pelle. Four kids that called all the other women about the right age for it mother and that seemed fine whenever she and Pelle came back from their pilgrimage with new bloods and it occurred to Dani to check on them. 

New blood, Dani discovered, was an interesting term among the Horga. She wasn't considered one after the birth of her first child. New blood had two uses to the Horga. New genes in the gene pool and blood for their gods. 

Once their purpose was accomplished, no new blood typically stayed, mostly because they died, but sometimes because they couldn't handle integration and tried to flee. 

Tried to being the operative word. On her fifth trip to midsommar there was another new blood May Queen. 

Dani watched her more than her own daughter. Fascinated by the birdlike fragility of her. She had arrived already bereft her fiance, Dani was told when she asked. Her last connection to the outside world. She was beautiful, dark haired with blue eyes with a willowy frame.

Her name was Marissa and she was Italian. 

She'd come long before the midsommar, a sister had brought her over with promises of sisterhood, of acceptance. Dani, a psychology major watched, enthralled as the Hogar worked their magic on her. Stockholm syndrome had clearly long set in, yet Dani had watched the very second it broke. A Horgan woman was chosen by the lottery and as the choice was always given, a new blood man who'd had the honor of impregnating the chosen mother was presented alongside her. 

Marissa's hands had trembled as she chose the Horga woman. 

Chose wrong, as Dani knew, unspoken as these things were, they had very real consequences. No one would say anything to her face of course, but already those who never truly trusted new bloods were sharing looks among themselves. Looks would lead to whispers. This would lead to rituals aimed to pull Marissa in deeper that would only work against their intention. 

Marissa wasn't like Dani, wasn't a killer who could smile in the face of her victim's ashes. Dani would have never tried to bring her home. But not everyone had the eye for it the way she and Pelle did.

Dani wasn't present when the valve broke. When Marrisa stole the keys to a truck and tried to flee. The Horga had reported the truck stolen and froze her visa. She'd later been picked up by the police. The report Pelle read to her said she'd been found dead in her cell. It had been ruled a suicide. She'd been found with a bedsheet around her neck. That's when Dani first knew the Local police had at least one very effective Horga plant.

It didn't matter. 

Because the Dani who had become the May Queen felt nothing about luring new bloods home as Pelle's lovely assistant. She made him more credible. The American wife who suffered her foreign husband's eccentric holidays. Who laughed about their crazy traditions like the Horga ritual site was a tourist attraction they'd be crazy to miss and not a deadly trap. 

Pelle often made love to her with Worship in his eyes after another midsommar went off seamlessly with their contributions. In the ten years of their shared pilgrimage they brought new bloods every time. They found their victims in bars. Libraries, parks, parking lots. Anywhere they found someone familiar in a way that evoked Mark, Josh, or Christian. 

"People the world would be better off without," Pelle murmured against her mouth. Dani didn't believe it, not really. But life had become a dream in a dance around a maypole and she was sure only death would wake her. The sacrifices she lured with her nominal husband were as real to her as her children were, which was not at all, and some part of Dani was still waiting to die. 

Even if the Horga wouldn't actively kill her.

Entering the fall phase among the Horga had been interesting. Becoming a worker should have changed things. Should have narrowed the world down, should have converted Dani into a true believer or at least a more present mother or wife.

It sort of did, and it sort of didn't. 

Her children became all the children among the Horga. Dani was a favorite for secrets, her low soothing tone one of the best for teasing out pain children tried to hide instinctively. It wasn't just limited to the children. She and Pelle were infamous among those that were due to take their pilgrimage, their record being what it was. She was sought after for advice, direction, encouragement. 

Her biological children were proud of her, she noted distantly. 

Proud and intimidated, their fights were nothing like the flares of emotion she remembered from her own childhood. They wanted to live up to her legend. They wanted her to be as proud of them as they were of her. The pressure they put on themselves led to a bitterness Dani scarcely understood. Mostly she let Pelle deal with them and lied a lot about being proud of them no matter what.

Pride was a foreign thing to Dani. 

She hadn't even had enough left to put to flame when she arrived among the Horga and burned the human parts of her soul. But monsters were good liars and she had Pelle to fill in any cracks. His love for their children was one of the realest most visceral things in her dream, and most of the time Dani could let it seep into her skin and pretend it was her own. 

Farming itself was hard mindless work that was almost meditative. Dani never had to think much about it, and any energy she had to spare was swallowed greedily by the Horga around her. Time had long lost all meaning and she only noticed it in the height of her children. The silver in Pelles carefully trimmed beard. The wrinkles in her own hands. 

Entering her winter and becoming an elder seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. 

Dani wasn't sure why she was surprised to find herself elected matriarch. 

She certainly had the pull for it among the Horga. She had been the 90th midsommar May Queen. The only new blood female to make the full transition in her generation, and an excellent track record with advising the Horga. The only difference Dani found in being the official matriarch, was that she now had to do ritual logistics and Rodvald interpretation to her usual minding of the family.

She focused mostly on ritual logistics and let Pelle do most of the interpreting. Alec, their current prophet, had been born with hands too deformed to hold a brush and had to make due with his mouth. Dani insisted Pelle was the one with the unclouded vision between them the first time she got stuck trying to make heads or tails of Alec's brushwork and Pelle had laughed and kissed her the way he had that first day when she won her throne.

Sometimes Dani wondered if she loved him. It was strange that she had never doubted he loved her. Pelle did have unclouded vision. He knew how empty she was, how much she needed him to fill her up so that she could function.

She had never hidden it from him. Never lied about her feelings or lack thereof. But Pelle had never strayed. At least, not that she'd noticed. Always by her side. Always in her ear, with compliments and suggestions. Always happy to distract her when useless things like doubt or guilt tried to flicker their way back to life in the burnt remains of Danis soul. 

Always.

If Pelle wasn't supposed to be present when it was her turn to interpret Alec's paintings, no one said a thing. They were the elders now and made the rules regardless. 

But also Dani had reached a point of unquestioned reverence among the Horga. She could slit the throat of a newborn babe and they would trust that her actions came from wisdom, that it was for the best of the family. 

Sometimes it occurred to Dani that the Horga were lucky there wasn't enough of her left to go mad with power. The years fluttered by. 

Dani trained her replacement and nominated her oldest daughter who had inherited her father's ability to twist people around her fingers and her own soothing voice as a candidate for the family's matriarch. She wouldn’t live to see her coronation, but it didn't matter to Dani, who just cared about dotting her i's and crossing her t's so that she would finally be allowed to step down as matriarch. 

The last two years before her Attestupa were calm. Slow days where she wandered the woods with Pelle hand in hand until it was midsommar again and it was the day before her dream came to an end.

"Thank you," Pelle whispered that night, "Thank you for coming home. Thank you for staying."

It answered a question Dani had been asking herself for years. Pelle, who's parents had offered themselves up as sacrifices for a midsommar when he was a child, had simply wanted someone who would stay. 

Someone who would never leave him behind the way they had. And Dani, too empty to do anything at all without his encouragement and direction, had filled that void for him just as much as he'd filled all the empty parts of her. 

He had never needed her love. Only her presence.

She laughed then, "We were meant to be."

Perfect broken pieces aligned like the manufactured edges of a puzzle. Dani had wondered fleetingly if he'd been sure to break her just right. Just so, so that they would fit together perfectly. Knowing Pelle as she did after forty-six years, it was a distinct possibility.

When morning came and the ritual began Dani put on her blue robes with something like anticipation. Saying the words and smearing her blood on the tablets she completed the ritual. Sending her hands high into the sky, wondering if the new bloods watching would be as horrified as she had been the first time she'd witnessed an Attestupa. 

She almost laughed. Forty-six years later standing in place of the sacrifice all she felt was a strange almost euphoric relief. Forty-six years later, Dani thought, tipping over the cliff. 

The dream finally came to an end.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I feel like the only reason I find Pelle a viable romantic male lead is all the brainwashing from pop culture about the romance of toxic relationships... 
> 
> Also, broken people are not often in a place to make good life choices and the Horga were clearly ready to capitalize on that IMO.


End file.
